


House of Cards

by GirlWhoWrites



Series: Jess & Alice [3]
Category: Twilight (Movies), Twilight Series - All Media Types, Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Alice's mental state is a very delicate thing - change my mind, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bella's Party, Diverse Twilight, F/F, JaliceWeek21 (Twilight), LGBTQA Twilight, Lesbian Twilight, Rae's fault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-13 15:34:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29280783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GirlWhoWrites/pseuds/GirlWhoWrites
Summary: She always thought that love was infinite and iron-clad; that they were above the pettiness that parted so many human lovers. They were Alice and Jess, and would be until time stopped. That there would never be a time that Alice reached out and Jess wasn’t right beside her.She was wrong. She was so wrong and maybe if she’d known she could have protected herself better.AU.
Relationships: Alice Cullen/Jessamine Hale, Carlisle Cullen/Esme Cullen, Edward Cullen/Bella Swan, Emmett Cullen/Rosalie Hale
Series: Jess & Alice [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2123445
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8
Collections: Jalice Week - February 2021





	House of Cards

**Author's Note:**

> Once upon a time, Rae wrote an amazing but horribly tragic fic for JaliceWeek21. It made me cry and I wasn't okay. So I decided to throw an Angst Tantrum and this was the result. 
> 
> Obviously, it's a very specific interpretation of the prompt (anti-soulmates). I just wanted to explore what happens when things don't fit together perfectly, when 'happily ever after' isn't the final stop; plus all those lovely fun themes like trauma and mental illness that I tend to use all the time.

The visions have been stalking her for weeks. 

She didn’t want to know, not really. She’s certainly not going to tell. 

She doesn’t know how to fix it. 

She just wants them to go away. To stop. To change.

But they don’t. 

—

It happens so quickly. Jess is fine, standing beside her, and then she has Bella in her grip. 

One minute Bella is cutting her finger, and the next there’s blood on her throat. 

The thing about Jessamine is that she moves like a feline - solid or fluid as it suits her. And in that moment, her movement was fluid and intentional so that no one could stop her. Bella was going to be _hers._

She cries out at Jess, but it’s not enough, and Bella’s bone-white and there’s yelling and somehow, _somehow_ , Emmett has Jess, who is hissing and spitting and her eyes are black. 

(Thank all the deities for Emmett McCarty Cullen. His salvage and rescue mission only took a second or two, but it’s because of him Bella lives. It’s because of him the House of Cullen does not fall. She’ll never tell him that, because she’ll never want to put the truth out there for them all to comprehend. That Bella died and then Bella lived, and time folds itself over again all because Emmett got to Jess.)

Bella’s lying unconscious on the rug, blood spilling out of her, and the smell is overwhelming, and Carlisle and Edward are hunched over her, and she runs out to the back yard with the rest of the family; Jess still struggling.

She never saw any of this. 

—

She always thought that love was infinite and iron-clad; that they were above the pettiness that parted so many human lovers. They were Alice and Jess, and would be until time stopped. That there would never be a time that Alice reached out and Jess wasn’t right beside her. 

She was wrong. She was so wrong and maybe if she’d known she could have protected herself better.

(That’s a lie, a damn lie. There was never a possibility of her not falling head over heels in love with Jess. There was no way she could have held even an ounce of herself, her love, back. That’s just how it was. How it is. How it will always be. Jess owns her, heart, mind, and soul.)

They’re out on the lawn, sucking in fresh air, trying to let the hunger and desire fade away. Only Carlisle and Edward have remained behind with Bella; the rest of them are week. 

Jess is kneeling in the grass, her gaze vacant and fixed on the flower bed in front of her. 

And a new future, one where Bella’s throat bares a ragged scar, and all her impossible, silly fears surface, begins to take shape.

“Jess, Jess,” she begins, half throwing herself at her girl. This isn’t how it’s supposed to be, this isn’t how it’s meant to be. “You _can’t.”_

Jess looks at her with haunted black eyes that make her face seem hollow, makes her seem - somehow - both ancient and very young, and Alice wants to burrow into her arms, make it better for both of them. 

“I tried so, so hard,” she murmurs, words for Alice’s ears only. “This isn’t working.”

“It was an accident, Bella’s going to be _fine.”_ She’s babbling and wondering if a vampire can hyperventilate because she certainly feels like it’s possible right at this moment. 

“I tried to rip her throat out.” The words are somehow flat but curious. Whatever Jess is feeling, she’s not sharing. 

Bella’s blood is drying around Jess’s mouth, on her chin, dripped onto her top. The same top Alice bought her and tailored for her and then peeled off her, giggling, just two weeks ago. 

The rest of the family is watching them, watching Alice kneel beside Jess in the soft dirt, in her party dress. They aren’t touching just sitting close because Alice is trying to stop herself from shaking. 

“You didn’t _mean_ it,” Alice says desperately, trying to stay focused and not fall into the future filling up her mind. “It’s okay! We can go away for awhile, just the two of us, it’s been stressful with Bella here…”

“Alice, I’m going _home_!” Jess finally yells, and Alice feels like her strings have been cut through, that the girl who holds her heart in her hands has just crushed it to dust, that the future she has worked so hard to build and protect has collapsed like a house of cards. 

There are a million things she could say right now, she could argue about, but all the words have been stolen from her because she knows. Nothing is going to change this. The ruby-red eyes in her vision have been Jess’s future since Bella Swan arrived, the catalyst for disaster. 

(Monterrey _isn’t_ home. It _isn’t_ \- Jessie told her that, years ago. They were lying in a motel bed, just happy to get away for a little way, and Jess had run her fingers over her stomach and told her she didn’t care the family had to move again; that _Alice_ was her home. Maybe it was sweet talk, maybe that’s been something that Alice has never wanted to face - that all these years Jess has been longing for a place she shouldn’t want, that for her, the Cullen family wasn’t their destiny, just a place to kill time, tread water, a particularly pleasant waiting room…)

(The fact she knows exactly what and where and _who_ Jess means when she says ‘home’ makes her want to vomit.)

Jess won’t let her come, and she knows that’s a worse fate for Jess anyway; to have her witness first-hand everything she came from, everything she has to be when faced with Maria of Monterrey. Jess Alone can survive the Southern Wars, but Jess and Alice cannot. And she won’t burden Jess with her survival, with her presence. She is not that cruel. 

She presses a kiss to Alice’s forehead, and for one last time, Alice feels Jess’s gift wrap around her, sink into her. It’s a feeling she’s known and loved for so long, and this is the last time she’ll feel it. 

“Jessie,” she whispers but it’s too late. 

There are no farewell kisses or promises or chances to hold her tight - Jess is simply gone, walking away from them so easily without looking back; her course is set, and Alice can only watch. 

She’s shaking so hard, and Esme’s kneeling beside her, holding her tight, promising her it _will_ be okay, Jessamine won’t have gone far. Won’t stay away long. Just needs time…

There aren’t any words left to shape the truth, and she tries not to cry when a new future begins to piece itself together in her mind. 

—

She doesn’t go back to school. (She doesn’t know what the cover-story is.)

She doesn’t go much of anywhere. (She is coerced into hunting and maims two deer in her struggle to control herself. Her eyes lighten some, but it isn’t the curative moment her family was hoping for.)

She goes right upstairs to curl up in a tight ball like a wounded animal, tries not to cry, or scream or let herself sink into the endless void of panic. And that’s where she stays. (For a while it still smells like them. But that doesn’t last long.)

She watches Jess closely, as close as she can manage. She sees red eyes and foreign blood join the stains that Bella left behind. (She wants there to be a precious reason Jess doesn’t discard her clothing immediately, but she knows its inherently practical.)

She sees fresh newborns snap and break skin. (Fresh scars, scars she wouldn’t know the shape of with her fingers or her mouth.)

She sees Maria touch Jess, offering something a little bit more. (She’s not sure what’s worse; having to watch Maria pull Jess back into their hideous dance, or understanding that it’s better than watching Maria actively destroy Jess. And she hates herself for not being able to decide.)

She doesn’t look to see if Jess reaches back. (The present is all wrong, the future is broken, so she decides to hide in her memories, in old visions that never got to come true, and in the happiest places and parts of her she can think of.)

—

It’s a day in January when she finds Carlisle, Edward, and Esme packing up Jess’s study. 

She hadn’t been in there. Opening the door and finding it empty meant this was real. That Jess was gone and there was no future that she saw her coming back. 

She screams and hollers and cries and threatens and they try to explain to her that this was to _help;_ just to put things into storage, nothing else. To give her some space to breathe.

And she wants to spit back that when _Edward_ left, the house remained a monument to him - Carlisle and Esme moved twice, and there was _always_ a shining baby grand arranged in the living room, just waiting for him to return. And yet Jess’s sanctuary has already been despoiled, everything that she was keeping in there gone the second the door was opened. She can put the books back on the shelf, plug the computers back in, but it’s over. There’s no fixing what they’ve done. 

(It’s Emmett who reads them the riot act, holds her tight, and looks at them and says, “Jesus _fucking_ Christ, what the hell were you _thinking_?” and she would be more appreciative if she didn’t feel like a raw wound being torn further open by the _day_.)

—

Jess never married her. They couldn’t, technically, get married. Maybe they would have in the future, if it were allowed, but those conversations were usually silly, romantic, and not a fixed plan. 

Instead, Jess gave Alice a locket she’d carried with her since she was a girl, right through one war and then another. It had a ‘W’ on the front, and the photos had been lost in Jess’s childhood. But Alice has put their photos in it, cut from photos taken in the ‘60s. 

She takes it off and puts it away the day after Jess’s study is cleared out. She tucks it into a drawer of her jewellery box, like she’s preparing for its burial. She lies it out against the velvet and she closes the drawer. Like she can put aside her pain and hurt and loss for later, can walk downstairs and pretend that every single second isn’t a war against panic and grief. 

(She’ll try anyway. Try and be someone. Leave the room and sit in a chair and have a conversation. Push away the visions. Change her clothing, do some laundry, not react when she finds one of Jess’s t-shirts twisted up in the hamper. Try and fight back to the surface and find something to hold her steady.) 

—

She’s failing at everything. 

She’s distracted and not talking much and not really interested in anything. 

The rest of the family is trying so hard, trying to talk to her, trying to include her, but it’s hard.

(It’s especially hard because it’s easier to live in her memories than in reality right now. When she’s talking to Carlisle, the gaping hole in her chest stretches and then she’s standing knee-deep in a river with Jess someone in Canada, and they’re laughing and smiling, and she knows what happens next and it was a _happy_ time. So she lingers there for a while, remembering the fall of Jess’s hair, and the weight of her hands, and the way she smelt. And when there’s nothing left to catalog, she’s back and Carlisle’s left for work and Edward’s back from school, and Esme’s turned on the lights.) 

She watches Esme and Carlisle, Rosalie and Emmett, Edward and Bella and she feels angry. It’s unfair, it’s cruel, that they have that and she lost hers. She knows it was Jessie’s choice entirely, that nothing would have convinced her otherwise, but she wants someone to blame. She wants to lash out that she _worked_ so hard for the family, to keep them happy and safe, and ended up with nothing. Ended up with less than nothing and it’s unfair. 

Instead, she hides. She hides in her room, in the library, in the room that used to be Jess’s. She hides in her memories, in her visions, in outright delusions. 

It becomes really, really easy to hide. 

—

One minute, Bella is sitting on the couch, the next minute Alice goes for her face. Bella screams.

(She said something. Something bad and wrong and terrible. Something hateful. But the words ring silently in the air. That just means she hasn’t decided how to say it yet.)

Her eyes keep changing colour.

Red.

Brown.

Red.

Brown.

Then the brown and the red falls together and Alice realises she’s made a terrible mistake. 

—

Immortality makes time a strange thing.

So does fortune-telling. 

But somehow the months fall like dominoes, and soon Bella and Edward will graduate. She still doesn’t know the official story of where her and Jess vanished too. She wonders if anyone cared.

She hasn’t seen Bella in awhile. She’s not entirely sure when she hurt Bella, and her horror at the event left her squirreled away in her room for days, still seeing the girl’s blood under her nails even after she’d scrubbed through an entire bar of soap. 

She doesn’t blame Bella, not at all. (Not yet. Blame will come after the words are _actually_ said out loud. Then she’ll hit and scratch and remind Bella that she nearly blinded her for them the first time.)

Then… well, she gets a vision about Edward and Carlisle realising there’s an army in Seattle before the army is robust enough to be noticed. She tries to focus enough to research, tries to explain, but only Rose and Emmett think she’s onto something. 

Of course she’s right. Victoria is coming, and they’ve lost the only one of them who knows how to face down a newborn army and live to see another day. 

(Carlisle makes the call, and that tastes like betrayal, that Carlisle knew how to find her this whole time and never told her. Never thought that maybe a voice on the other end of the line might be a balm, a life-preserver, something to pin her hopes and her sanity to. When he tells them Jess is coming with help, she laughs sharp and hard, a foreign sound out of her mouth and they look at her, startled. But she’s too far gone to explain herself, and she doesn’t owe anyone the opportunity to gawk at all the pieces and pain that made up her and made up Jess, and made them up together.)

—

She sees Jess arrive on the battlefield with Maria, Peter, and Charlotte in tow. Her chest feels tight at the sight; Jess’s eyes are luminous red, and she looks grimmer than ever and Alice knows how much she’s hurting, how much that life always hurt her. She wants to take that hurt away.

Maria has a smirk on her face, walks close to Jess. Too close. 

But the weight in her chest is nothing new; it’s been sitting there since September, getting heavier. She knows what the future holds for her, without Jess. She doesn’t know if Edward doesn’t know, doesn’t believe her, or doesn’t care because she knows he still holds a grudge against her and against Jess. But it’s as unchanging as those first visions, and she’s accepted what is to be her fate.

She doesn’t care. She doesn’t care about much anymore. She knows what her future holds and it’s nothing she can change. 

Jess’s gaze is fixed to her, where she stands next to Emmett. She nods in greeting at Maria, Peter, and Charlotte and wonders what this would be like if she didn’t feel like she was slowly being taken apart. She wonders if she’d slap Maria, if she’d kiss Jess and beg her to stay. 

She doesn’t say anything, but Jess is probably the only one who notices that. She hasn’t done much talking in a while. 

_Jess slams her up against the tree, her mouth hot and demanding and Alice meets her challenge, tearing into her clothing. There’s no doubt that everyone can hear them, everyone knows what they’re doing, and she doesn’t care - she has the press of Jess’s body against hers, she has Jess in her arms, it’s all she ever wanted and needed. They’ve only got this moment, this singular point in time, because Jess is going to leave again. But Alice will take this, take any small assignation every once in a while because it’s_ Jessie. 

_Except…_

_The bite mark on her throat is fresh, and reality is that Jess went right back to Maria in every way that mattered. That the marks Alice left on Jess’s body have already been obscured by fresh bites. It makes her want to cry._

“Alice?”

She blinks. The world has changed again; Emmett is beside her, and Rosalie is watching her with kind eyes. Rosalie, not Esme. After Bella, then. She thinks. God, she can’t remember. They aren’t home, she can’t go and hide until the world tips right again. 

(She shoves that vision away because as much as she wants it, she knows it can only end badly. And every time she thinks she’s found rock-bottom, thinks she can’t hurt or weep any more than she already has, she finds new depths to plumb.)

—

“…What happened to Bella’s face?” Jess finally asks. 

Jess’s eyes are red, and Maria’s here. Victoria, then. The battle. Creeping closer, closer, to her fate. 

There is silence and then perfectly diplomatic Esme speaks.

“Alice had a vision and didn’t know where she was. Bella was standing close to her, and there wasn’t … it was an accident.”

Jess is horrified, she knows. She knows the look on her face, she’s seen this before. That Jess doesn’t recognise this version of her. 

The mad girl, the demon, the monster. 

(It took her twenty-eight years to lock all that away, and only months for it all to come spilling out again.)

And sweet Esme hasn’t told the truth. The truth is, she _was_ attacking Bella. But not the now-Bella, a later-Bella. A vampire Bella who could fight back. Instead, she lashed out at soft, human Bella and tore at her face - the scars run a furrow down the left side of her face, stitched back together as neatly as Carlisle could manage. Her left eye droops a little now but no one says anything.

She can’t remember what story they decided upon in the end, but maybe a fall? A wild animal? She knows that Charlie was ridiculously grateful to Carlisle for the medical care. She knows that the pack only know the cover story, believe that cover story completely - after all, there was no bite. 

But after that, after Esme had to scrub Bella’s blood off the carpet for a second time, she stepped back from Alice, fussing over her human daughter instead. She knew Esme loved her, but she couldn’t make peace with the hurt that Alice inflicted on Bella, couldn’t comprehend the rage that had made Alice lash out. She knows that Esme confessed all her confusion, all her grief, all her anger to Carlisle behind closed doors. She saw it, heard Esme say the words, that - the closest thing she’d ever had to a mother - felt like she’d lost two daughters when Jess left. 

That Alice alone was worth less than Alice with Jess. 

That had hurt in new ways.

How many girls had two mothers turn away from them?

But she’d learned how to carry pain. 

—

Her head swoops, and suddenly she’s in her bedroom again, curled tight in a ball in the still of the night, and there is _pain_ in her head like nothing else. She reaches to hold her head, but the pain doesn’t flicker or change. She lets out a cry and then…

“Alice? _Alice_?”

It had been Emmett and Rosalie that reached out to her. Rosalie has been a good sister, the very best sister, since. Emmett is so sad for her, so gentle. Neither of them get upset with her, neither of them get frustrated. They try to keep her calm, remind her of where she is, remind her that they love her, even on the bad days. She knows they stayed for her, instead of traveling. She loves them for it. She should tell them that more often. 

Rosalie has her arms around her, and she’s clutching her head, her eyes squeezed tight. But the pain has gone. Or hasn’t happened yet.

It will. 

“Rose?” her voice sounds hoarse and bewildered. Everyone is staring at her, and she straightens up. 

There’s no point explaining what she’s seen. Her visions have been shrinking in range for weeks now, shrinking down to just her and Jess; Jess’s moments hurt like nothing else (or rather, they hurt like something she thinks she should remember but doesn’t), and her moments are meaningless, unhelpful. Apparently, the only valid visions are the ones that protect and benefit the family. 

Any others, she needs to keep to herself. That’s what Edward said to her, his voice sharp and imperious, when she told Bella, _yes_ the scar would be noticeable. (Bella had asked.)

The world is crisper than before, and it’ll take a moment, but for now, she’s fixed in a time and place. 

(She hopes.)

—

“Alice can’t fight.”

The words are sharp and dispassionate and her name sounds strange coming out of Jess’s mouth in such a way. It doesn’t sound like her name. It sounds judgemental and dismissive, and she remembers a future where Jess would be holding her hand, where they would be standing close enough to each other to touch. When she would protest at Jess’s overprotectiveness, and Jess would give in but worry. 

(That’s a nice future. She might go looking for that one when she’s home again. Sink into a reality where she cannot smell or touch or taste, but is close enough to give her some kind of peace, for a little while at least.)

Everyone exchanges looks. 

“I’ll be fine,” she says mechanically, staring at a spot just past Jess’s right shoulder. “I’ve seen it.”

Emmett and Rosalie meet Jess’s gaze and nod, a silent agreement that the three of them will keep an eye on her, will keep her out of trouble. She pretends she doesn’t see it, doesn’t acknowledge it.

(Everything will be fine. They’ll fight, they’ll win, Victoria will die. Victoria has to die, she knows that. But… maybe she understands a little. Maybe she’d tried to tear the world down if Jessie was dead, and not just gone. Maybe she’d want a pound of flesh in her rage if someone else had taken Jess out of the world.

Maybe that’s why she ripped open Bella’s face. Maybe that was her trophy, her retribution, her act of war. Not a vision at all, just grief and frustration and so very much regret.)

— 

They fight, they win, Victoria dies for love of an unworthy man.

It’s the oldest story. 

(It’s going to be Bella’s story, and that makes her giggle, and that makes them all look at her, concerned, because they’re burning body parts and cleaning up the battlefield, and there’s nothing inherently funny about a fifteen-year-old girl losing her head in a made-up war.)

She watches Jess from across the field, and she wonders what is better - dying for an unworthy man, or pining for the one that discards you. 

(She’s never going to stop wishing for her. There will never be a time when she wouldn’t welcome Jess back, cling tight to her, and give her anything she wants. She can be angry, furious, heartbroken, and desperate, and still want Jess back home. 

She’d give anything for that.)

—

Jess doesn’t say good-bye. She didn’t the first time either. There is no kiss on the forehead this time, either, no benediction to see her through. She just walks away. 

Again. 

She watches Jess leave with Maria from her bedroom window. 

She could run after them, beg Jess to take her with them, but she won’t.

She knows her future, can see the emptiness stretching before her, unbroken. 

She sees no reason to change it.

**Author's Note:**

> \- I want to point out that Jess is definitely suffering as well. This focuses on Alice, but Jess isn't happy or fulfilled, just totally miserable. 
> 
> \- There isn't really a villain here, or rather, I didn't intend for anyone to be a villain. Esme is grieving and struggling, Carlisle is trying to support his wife and his youngest children, Jess is punishing herself, Alice has had a breakdown, Edward is trying to protect Bella, and Rosalie and Emmett are mourning.
> 
> \- In Jess-verse, she and Emmett are bffs, so Emmett would absolutely assume responsibility for Alice, and Rosalie would blame Edward and Bella for tearing apart the family. And Rose would absolutely be protective of Alice because of how horrific she would find life without Emmett. Plus Alice and Rosalie have been sisters for decades; there's a bond there.
> 
> \- This is a full AU, and does not fit into any of my other Jess/Alice fics. Bella's birthday party in the 'main' Jess/Alice verse is a lot more fun for Jess.


End file.
